Viewing Gabriel Knight 2 Movies

If you have enough free hard-drive space, keen enough to twiddle around with a text configuration file, and are willing to follow a few simple instructions, then you will be able to view any one of the game's vast number of movie files, outside of the game context!

If you are looking for a complete list of all the filenames, matching to its coreesponding description, then this has now been compiled, thanks to the superb efforts of Jay Prychidny. It has been split into 5 HTML pages:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

Alternatively, you can download a zipped version (13k) in plain ASCII text.

Follow each of the following steps, and you can't go wrong!

1. Create a sub-directory on your hard-drive (such as "movies").

2. Copy into the newly created sub-directory the appropriate movie file that you wish to view. These may be found on any of the CD's in the "\movies" directory, and should be named a number, with a file extension ".vmd".

3. Rename the movie file(s) that you copied into the sub-directory created in 1] to the KEY FILENAMES necessary to actually allow them to be viewed.
   

   The KEY FILENAMES that you should use when renaming are as follows:

   Game Version	Original Video Contents	Filename
   English (UK, v1.1)	Opening credits sequence	10010.vmd
   	Gabriel visited by townsfolk	20.vmd
   	Gabriel wakes up in Chapter 1	40.vmd
   Do you have a country/language version of GK2 that is different from the above? If so please let me know!

   
   
4. Edit the file called "resource.cfg" that is inside your installed game directory (make a backup of this file if you like). Change the entry that says:

   movieDir=CD:\movies

   Or something similar to:

   movieDir=D:\movies

   With the directory path being the full sub-directory that you created in 1].

5. Start up the game, and watch the modified credits, game introduction, and chapter 1 sequence!

NOTES

Things to look out for when following the above instructions are:

1. To view the maximum three videos concurrently at anyone time, you should make sure that you start the game using the first CD. To further speed up the whole process, the file copying and renaming should be done when running the windows version of the game.

2. The file numbering system used for movies on Gabriel Knight 2 game CD's that are outside of the UK english version may very well be different. If this is the case, it is a simple matter to make the game tell you what the filenames should be.

   Simply copy any one of the video files (preferably one which could not happen to be the credit sequence, i.e. a small file would suffice) into the sub-directory that you created. Then, attempt to run the game, and view the intro.

   The game should bring up a dialogue box warning you of being unable to find the right file, and should also mention the file number that should have been loaded. you have just found the first of the possible three filenames that you can view in one session.

   You should be able to repeat the steps to determine the second and third file numbers to complete the viewing set.

3. If you get a game error warning that it couldn't find a file called "999.pal", then the CD drive has probably not been reset back to the root path for the game to continue. Before restarting the game, simply change to your CD drive and change to the root directory by type "cd \" then pressing enter. A surprisingly frequent mistake that is made when copying movies files out of the "\movies" directory!

4. I have begun to catalogue some of the more interesting videos that can be found. However, I have a feeling that this may only be of use to owners of the same UK version that I own. Nevertheless, I may transcribe what I have into a table in the future.

5. As a general rule, you can avoid some of the smaller files (less than 8-10mb) as these tend to be Gabriel (or Grace) opening doors, or interviewing people, rather than being anything significant.

If you have any problems while performing any of these things, please let me know so that I can publish extra information that everyone else can read about. Thanks!

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